Studio: international art (55.1912)

Art School Notes

FIGS. 1-3. ILLUSTRATING MR. CATTERSON-SMITH’S METHOD OF MEMORY-TRAINING AT THE MUNICIPAL SCHOOL OF
ART, MARGARET STREET, BIRMINGHAM. FIG. I IS A LANTERN SLIDE SHOWN ON THE SCREEN FOR ABOUT FIVE
MINUTES ; FIGS. 2 AND 3 ARE DRAWINGS MADE OF IT FROM MEMORY BY FIRST-YEAR BOYS, THE AVERAGE TIME

OCCUPIED BEING ABOUT TWO HOURS

art school studies are made with very little exercise
of the memory or of the mental picturing faculty
•—I do not say with none, but with very little, for
some memory there must be if there is any pro-
gress. Designing or composition, too, is often
merely a puzzled-out arrangement on paper in
accordance with acquired rules, possessing little,
if any, visionary charm. Hence much of the lack
of interest in designs.

Having arrived at the foregoing conclusions I
have been endeavouring to apply them to art teach-
ing. The following gives briefly my experience :

I find that the average student can be trained
so as to be able to remember and draw, after
one look ot a few
minutes’ duration, such
complicated designs
as Fig. 1 in his first
school year. Literal-
ness is not pressed upon
him while he is making
such drawings, as
the exercise of his
invention, where his
memory fails, is con-
sidered a gain. In
making these drawings he
may or may not exercise his
mental imaging powers : that
being so, and the exercise of
that faculty being considered
essential, it becomes neces-
sary to discover some method
of developing it with cer-
taitity. The initial difficulty
is to know when the student
really has an image in his
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mind’s eye. Suppose, for instance, that one said
to twenty students : “ I want you to see a thin
crescent in your mind’s eye.” How is one to know
that they all really see it, for they can easily think
a mere memory of the crescent is the same as a
mental image of it. Even when one has arrived at
the conclusion that the student understands clearly
what a mental image means, one has still to face
the likelihood that he will be too lazy to make the
necessary effort to visualise. One has consequently
to seek out things which cannot be drawn unless
mental imaging has taken place. I thought at first
that a drawing made with the eyes shut would meet
that difficulty, but I found a drawing can be made
with the eyes shut when there is no mental picture

FIGS. 4-6. ILLUSTRATING MENTAL COMPOSITION OF DESIGN BY BOY STUDENTS,
WHO ARE FIRST SHOWN THE UNIT, A B C D, WITH THE INSCRIBED FIGURE E

FIG. 7. ILLUSTRATING ANOTHER EXERCISE IN MENTAL TICTURING